SEOClearly: A/B Testing SEO Reports that Make Sense

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How relevant is SEO software post Panda and Penguin? Not at all for link building, but how about software that helps you make sense of which of your pages perform better in search, allowing you to analyze the results of A/B testing based on reliable data? SEOClearly attempts to be that software, and it does a pretty good job at it.

Site SEO improvements can be seen through testing elements like copy text, layouts, images and more. SEOClearly makes sense of A/B testing results.

“Since Panda & Penguin Google is constantly changing its algorithms, sometimes several times a week,” Michael Gloess, SEOClearly founder told Search Engine Journal. “In this environment you can’t succeed with a linear trial and error testing any longer. To work both data-driven and fast, you need split testing , and SEOclearly helps you to do that.”

SEOClearly is designed for large ecommerce sites, real estate sites, travel sites or other similar businesses that need a clear overview of their sites’ performance in Google search engine results. The software produces a variety of split tests (A/B) reports, based on data grabbed directly from Google through Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. To work, you need to entrust SEOClearly with limited access to this data.

The next step is to figure out what to test, and which parameters make more sense for your site. Because SEOClearly was designed to track changes you made on your site’s templates (A/B testing) you should perform such a test before using it. Then you can test everything from the effect of images, to headlines, title tags, text quality, social media buttons, banner ads, links and much more.

The software generates reports in a matter of seconds, based on parameters you set up for your test. If you want to see how pages with images perform against pages without images, for example, all you need to do is to set up a test with two variations – “pages with images” and “pages without images” – then add the URLs to be compared for each, either manually, or using SEOClearly’s URL filter. You will see reports for number of visits to the selected variation, position in SERPs, number of keywords, and CTR. SEOclearly also shows user-experience metrics like the bounce rate, average time on site and pages per visit for each variation.

Using the URL filter makes sense if you want to review hundreds of pages at the same time.

SEOClearly starts grabbing the data for each variation as soon as you moved to your next action. Thus, while you add a second variation, SEOClearly is already finishing the report for the first. This saves time, and provides reports close to real-time.

SEOclearly allows you to add as many variations as you like.

SEOClearly will then show you how your site performs in Google SERPs, mainly how the number of visits from Google increased or decreased, monitoring:

The positions of keywords (without limiting the number of keywords you can track)

Keywords that did not get any more visits from Google or showed up for the first time

The click trough rate

SEOClearly in-depth report filters the most important URLs when analyzing the reasons for losing or winning in Google.

Even if you are not performing A/B testing on your site, you can still use SEOClearly to make sense of a variety of data, like which pages of your site performed best on a given time frame versus another time frame, which categories of a site perform better, and so on.

If you are interested, there is a 30-day free trial, then pricing starts at $399 per month. Since SEOClearly launched recently (September 2012), there is still a chance for first users to get it at a special price of $99 per month.

Mihaela Lica Butler is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Reuters, Al Jazeera and others), with an experience of over 10 years in online PR.